History Plus… Music and Theatre

Tuesday we spotlighted a couple of current student-athletes in our department, each of whom reflected on the importance of pursuing both academics and athletics as part of their Bethel education. Today one of our recent graduates, Dana Morrison (’12), celebrates a different curricular/co-curricular combination…

I studied history at Bethel. Beyond my studies, I was a member of Bethel Choir for three years (plus Women’s Chorale during my freshman year), performed in five theatre productions, and held a handful of on-campus jobs including writing for Bethel publications and helping to catalogue the permanent art collection. No one activity, or even what I chose to study, defined who I was as a student or the person I have become. It was my involvement in all of it that helped me become a well-rounded person.

What I came to realize after a time was that even though I was involved in separate, seemingly unrelated activities, everything was connected. I could be studying oppression of a modern class in my Advocacy Journalism class, which tied in to the struggles of immigrants I was learning about in my Modern America class, which in turn I used as inspiration for my character in the musical Urinetown, about oppressed people in a Depression-like town. Soon the connections formed a kind of puzzle that depicted who I was as a whole person. I’m not an historian, a singer, an actor, or a writer. I am all of these things: a whole, well-rounded person who had the opportunity to explore all of these avenues while attending Bethel.